Ed - Jim sent me most of the green coffees in the contest and I tried a few blends on my own. My fave was a 50/50 Guat/Sidamo like yours but I went relatively light on each bean, pulling it just as 1st crack disappeared. By doing that, I achieved a more assertive and complex cup. The cup profile had more of the fruit and a little more acidity than your cup.

If you have enough beans and are planning to re-roast, just for kicks you could try to roast it just a bit faster and/or try your original blend with no full city Sidamo component that may have calmed things down. You might like the result. Just a thought.

This is all so subjective...

BobY

Bob
Will try as you suggested and try a couple different profiles on the lighter side. I was concerned that I might have been a bit timid in treating the Ethiopian elements light enough as the fruits didn't shine as I had hoped. After tasting the components after resting and the sample shipped I preferred the lighter Sidamo roast and as you mentioned should have left the med. roast out.
Thanks for all your help with this event.
Ed

I'm not sure how to reply to the final results. I'm simply flabbergasted. I started roasting 5 years ago with a Kenya from SM in a popcorn popper. Those first attempts were so baked, grassy, and awful that I gave up and just bought pre-roasted stuff for a couple of years until I found out about the Coretto heat gun/ bread machine method. To go from that to being Tom's preferred roast in this competition is a wonderful feeling and makes me realize how far I've come. Thanks again to all of you for donating your time and effort, and thanks to all the entrants and for all the information that is being shared. I'm already enjoying some of the suggested blends like Ed's since I was too apprehensive to try any blending of my own. Also, congratulations to Henry as the overall winner and for his espresso entry. I'll have to submit something in the espresso category next year.

Now, I want to add any information I can think of since what I posted earlier probably wasn't very informative. At the very least, I can offer some advice to people just getting into home roasting with the HG/BM method. Honestly, I think my roasts have improved greatly with my latest heat gun and haven't seen many model recommendations for this method. I've gone through two low-end Wagners that both died (This one ). They worked pretty well, but even in the summer I believe my roasts lasted at least 15 minutes for 1 pound even if I tried to go as fast as I could. I also tried a higher end Wagner and a Ryobi in the $50-$60 range that I wasn't impressed with. On a whim, I tried this Homeright Heatpro and it has been just great. I can roast pretty much as quickly as I like, even when the outside temp is in the low 30s like it was when I roasted my entry. The vents are also designed so that they don't get plugged with chaff as easily, and the cool setting is nice and I hope to keep the heating element alive longer than I did with my two Wagners.

Other than that, I can't think of anything to add. Eventually I'll get a good thermometer so I can keep track of temperature with time. I've really been putting that off for way too long.

Sherman Chong, one of the winners on the espresso side, also uses a heat gun/bread machine combo, although he lowers the load to get faster roasts rather than upgrading the heat gun. He's looking to share tips with others going for high quality roasts with this set up.

I would be interested in any information he has to share and really need to go read through the espresso results thread. I've consistently roasted 1 pound batches and was afraid to deviate from that for this contest. If I had done smaller batches, I would have experimented with blending and perhaps an espresso entry, although my Rocky needs new burrs and is grinding pretty poorly for espresso right now. Maybe I'll try .5 pounds next time and go easy while trying not to scorch anything.

Too bad this wasn't the "First Quarterly HB Roasting Competition" (hint). Fantastic learning experience, even for those of us who are too cheap. I've reread these writeups multiple times now... rewatched the cupping video...

Thanks Home-Barista, helpers and participants for the education.

CHAD

Based on the reviews of my roast, and some general stuff I learned from Tom's video commentary on some of roasts, I thought I would share something I think I learned from this.

One day, I roasted the Sumatra with three different profiles, slow, medium and fast, as follows

Sumatra FTO Aceh Arinagata
First crack at 369 after 9:23 minutes, stopped at 426F at 15:00 minutes
First crack at 365 after 9:11 minutes, stopped at 428F at ???? minutes
First crack at 365 after 6:45 minutes, stopped at 428F at 10:20 minutes

Unfortunately, I forgot to record how long the medium roast was. I'm also not sure why first crack for the medium roast was so close to the slow roast, I expected more difference. I use a PID to control ET, but I also manually control fan speed, so a variance in the fan speed probably accounts for why there is not more difference.

After a few days, tried a cup of each. I thought the slower roasts were noticably better then the fast roast, so I used a slower profile for the competiion roast. The slow and medium roasts were different, but I had a hard time picking which I liked better.

The competion profile was:
First crack at 374F after 9:46 minutes, stopped at 428F at 13:15 minutes

The point of this is that I think using a slower profile for a softer bean like the Sumatra was a good think, and helped my blend.

My mistake was being too lazy to do the same comparision roasts for the Fazenda and the La Maravilla. I used a similar slow profile for these, and now I think they would have benefited from a faster roast.

Randy